Review Summary

The solitude of a writer, who has retreated to a seaside villa with his dog and a vaguely defined but pressing project, is disrupted one rainy night by the arrival of unwelcome guests. A man and a woman, on the run from something (the police? a criminal gang?), burst in and demand shelter. Deaf to the writer’s protests, the man leaves the woman — he says she’s his sister — in the other man’s care, promising to come back soon.This could be the start of a mystery, and that word would not be completely out of place as a description of “Closed Curtain.” But the narrative puzzles that might animate a more conventional film soon give way to other, more complicated enigmas. One of these is precisely what kind of movie this is, a question that has special piquancy because Jafar Panahi, who is credited as a writer and director (with Kambuzia Partovi, who plays the writer), is under a 20-year filmmaking ban imposed by the Iranian government. -- A. O. Scott